#HELP I CHECKED IT OUT MYSELF AND THE FIRST IMAGE RESULT IS BLURRED anyways happy early halloween

[waywardsalt]

hell yeah trick or treat!!!

Happy Halloween! You get this Glalie card and the Drake Tiamat!

[wackygoofball]

I really like your moodboard/aesthetics and they’ve been inspiring me to try my own hand at creating some. Only, I’m not sure where to start? Would you have any tips?

Hi, thank you very much, @idontwantto10! ♥

Glad to hear that my little moodboards sparked your own creativity. The more the merrier, after all. ☺

To give this fair warning… I don’t have a particular technique or anything, I mostly just play around with effects or themes until something comes out that I enjoy.

So… I will start out saying what I tend to do, and maybe you can take something from that:

The first step is to get an idea for the theme (at least that is my starting point). Sometimes, I will have an idea in the back of my head already. Sometimes it’s a fanfic I actually have in mind, so it’s rather fleshed-out and I will have specific ideas of what it will look like, which can be both a blessing and a curse, because that may be limiting when you can’t find images that correlate with your mental image. And sometimes… I don’t know what I am up to, so I just start brainstorming.

I keep lists of ideas, that helps a great deal - because I tend to forget a lot. Sometimes it’s just a key word or the basic plot for the moodboard-story.

But if I don’t have a plan? I just check out pictures to get some inspiration. Or I google movie lists to get an idea for an AU.

1. Image Hunt

The first step in the actual creation process for me is finding fitting pictures. I normally use pixabay.com because they feature a whole lot of free images. I also recently started using some Pinterest images, but for those, I include the links to the pins in the “Additonal Image Sources” section featuring in most of my moodboard text posts. On that same note, I try my best to link to the image sources I have available to me. The one thing where I normally don’t have the image sources anymore is the Nik and Gwen images I have because I just have soooooooo many of them in my files that I can’t keep track anymore, to be honest.

Generally, I have a huge file full of all kinds of images, so I have a base to fetch from without image-hunting *everything* over and over again. So when I have an idea for a certain theme, I will start out searching for images relating to that specific theme. If we take the military-themed moodboard I did ages ago as an example, I will search for images about “war,” “soldiers,” “guns,” “rifles,” “training,” etc. (whatever key words I can come up with) until I have a workable number of results. Naturally, that depends on the size of the collage and how many images the collage requires. Those images, for me, are the way to transmit the theme to others so that they know what that is about even without having to read the text post below.

Then I ask myself the question: What are the emotions of the characters (in my case… JB always, duh). Are they depressed somehow or at some point? Then I may want to include images transmitting that. Is this a happy moodboard? Then maybe I wnat to look for images that show Gwen and Nik laughing (or free images of people looking similar or where you can’t really tell what the person looks like).

Beside that, my JB Moodboards, for the sake of their sweet, sweet love, will also require images that give me the romantic vibe. Hence, having a solid base of images of kisses and hugs and all that is almost inevitable for my way of moodboarding.

And yeah, JB image hunting... that’s a thing of its own. I have soooo many imgaes saved to my computer by now, it’s pretty insane, but naturally, you can’t make a JB moodboard without them (unless it were solely book!Jaime and book!Brienne related). So yeah, a solid base of them is also necessary. I am always looking for images that display different kinds of mood and emotions or feature different settings.

So now, after the image hunt is over and stored on the computer, the next step is in place.

2. Piecing Together

Generally, what I do is decide on how I am going about this. Do I want to include gifs or just still images? If I include gifs, I have to think about the file sizes, I have to think about how to fit it with other images. If I want to include still images, do I want to piece them together individually or do I simply want to have them made into a collage (for which there are numerous websites out there that will do the job for you)?

As for my personal prefences, I like mixing up the way of arranging singular images, that some are bigger, some are smaller, some square, some rectangle. Others may enjoy the more focused and reduced moodboards more (and I love them as well, but for the story-themed moodboards, those work best for me personally), but I like to have some variations between the collages, especially since it allows for aligning the text (later step) in different ways.

But yeah, that’s a thing of taste, really.

So, for the sake of making an example, let’s stick to the idea that I want to do (another) military-themed moodboard for JB and that I want to have collages using a website. Then I piece them together on the website (depends on which one you are using) and see how things look harmonic to me.

Hence, I have to decide on how many Jaime and Brienne images I want per frame, how many theme-images I want to include in one collage, if I want to include a kiss or a hug picture in that image, and if so, where.

I I have a certain story in mind with the moodboard, I am trying to have a kind of narrative trajectory. I will start out introducing the theme (hence some of the themed images always go in the first panel) and link it to Jaime and Brienne, whom I will introduce (say, Jaime as the commander of the squad and Brienne as one of the team members). Then I may do another collage that shows their struggling (depressed-themed images) and then move over to mixing in romantic images in one of the following panels.

In the end, it depends on the images I find and how they look right to me. That doesn’t mean that they look right to other people, but that is then what I have in my mind.

After that is done and saved to my computer, the next step is in place:

3. Effects

Yet again, that depends on the programs or websites you are choosing. Googling around will give you a manifold of options to fetch from. I do a lot of editing with GIMP, though I also rely on websites where they have preset color-effects to fetch from. Again, it’s worth googling to see what you like best.

Anyway, sticking with the idea of the military-themed moodboard, that may set the color palette for most of the images. I would likely include collages that feature earth/green color tints or black and white images, or darker effects to help intensify the mood and unify the images of the moodboard (which is a great way to make it seem like they actually form a unity and aren’t just images you put together for the sake of it).

4. Text

That’s optional. I tend to add text to convey the story I am trying to tell. Yet again, there are online services that will do that, or you can use editing programs such as GIMP for the task. The advantage of GIMP etc. is that those programs will mostly offer a vast array of options to fetch from, since you can easily download fonts that fit your theme. For military-themed moodboards, all sorts of typewriter fonts look really well to me.

As I hinted at above, the way the collage is set up will in some way determine the way the text will be set. Personally, I like to use different fonts and put the text boxes in varied spots (sometimes I will have one in the upper left corner and one in the lower right corner, one time it may be at the center, another time it may be in the middle of one particular image within the collage, it really depends).

As to the content… well, it always depends on the moodboard itself, of course. I often like to include sort of “quotes” of what I believe JB would say in the story I am trying to tell through the images. I sometimes give further exposition by simply adding JB’s names and their function in the moodboard (are they officers, are they married, is one of them a scientist or a thief, etc.?).

Basically… it’s about making explicit those kinds of part of the story that the images cannot convey in its specificity or that help set the mood. The text can also link images together or bridge between one part of the collage and the next.

But yeah, in the end, it really depends on the story you want to tell and to what extent you want to explicitly narrate it through text. Sometimes just the images are more telling than any written text.

So… that is basically the motions I go through when piecing a moodboard together, but another chronology or take on it may well work better for you, so that really depends on your own preferences.

As to the technicalities… it yet again really depends on the programs you are using. My approach is always… trying things out, really. Do I like this effect they offer as a preset in GIMP? Do I like one from a website that offers effecs more? Do I want to overlay it with a blurred image to create this “bloom” effect? Do I want to add a bokeh effect? Do I want to layer it with a texture? Those are the kinds of things I can only advise to honestly try out (if you want to try them out - I mean… you can also simply put the images together, effects are not mandatory by any means). That is how I learned more about GIMP and how to use it. So yeah, it’s a bit of trial-and-error for me. I play around with effects and settings of text until I personally find it fitting.

In the end, it really is a matter of taste, so I can’t give any specific tutorial or walkthrough for how to get a nice moodboard. This is my way of going about it, yours may be vastly different.

But yeah, I hope this was of some help regardlessly.

Thanks another time for the compliment and that you reach out to me.

Much love! ♥ ♥ ♥

And I am looking forward to your own creations!